


Rewritten

by s3as1de



Category: Their Finest (2016)
Genre: Alternate Ending, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:27:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 5,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26303422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/s3as1de/pseuds/s3as1de
Summary: Weeks later I'm still thinking about this movie's nonsense plot twist ending. If the scene on the beach can be rewritten, so can the rest of it. In this version, no one dies >:[
Relationships: Tom Buckley/Catrin Cole
Comments: 9
Kudos: 14





	1. Prologue

A full moon. A clear sky. A man sits by the shore. There has been a quarrel. A woman is walking away from him. Now, she turns back.  
“I didn’t mean what I just said,” she says quietly, reclaiming her seat beside him. As she glances his way, a spark of that old fire returns. “And anyway, you said worse.”  
“It was a declaration,” he responds with what dignity he can muster, not yet meeting her eye.  
“‘Stupid bloody fool’ was good. Did you think of that beforehand?”  
Laughter. Now he’s looking at her. “Are you trying to pick a fight with me, Mrs. Cole?”  
“No. What I’m trying to say is that…” She hesitates, then words flow. “If all of this stopped. The sparring and the jibing and the insults and the arguments, I’d miss it. Even if I were dead, I would miss it.”  
A crooked smile. “The Catrin Cole School of Dialogue. On and on and on and on.”  
She exhales, exasperated, smiling.  
“Lose half,” he says.  
“Which half?”  
“The half you don’t need.”  
“Alright,” she says. “Alright. I’d miss you.”  
His smile loses its courage. For once, he’s at a loss for words.  
Her voice is barely a whisper. “I’d miss you more than I could say.”


	2. Chapter 2

Tom Buckley, fair-haired and bespeckled, takes up his usual position at the edge of the room, on the outside and looking in. The bar is packed with life, inebriated cast and crew scattered about in huddles of conversation, basking in warm light. At the piano, the rowdier members of the group belt folk songs in harmony. The end is in sight. After months of rewrites, mishaps, and foul weather set on thwarting their every move, the pieces have fallen into place. All that remains is the return home from Devon to London, completing the action in a cozy studio lot. Tom smiles and nods at everyone who sends a friendly glance his way, but hides behind his untouched drink. He’s searching for a face he won’t find in the crowd.  
Whispers spread in her wake. Mrs. Catrin Cole. A surname and a title that don’t truly belong to her, after all. It’s a character in a screenplay she’s written for herself, where everything is as it should be. She rarely speaks about him, the Mr. Cole in question, but her confidantes aren’t impressed on her behalf and are happy to share it. Her face lights up when she talks about possibilities, but falls when reflecting on realities. He hasn’t been playing the leading man, flubbing his lines. Self-absorbed, fixated on his art, embarrassed by her success. Tom is disturbed by his own relief to learn about their sham of a marriage, but the feeling doesn’t last. She’s left the set, she’s gone back to him, the man behind the mask. Without her, the busy room feels empty. Tom takes a drink.

A wedding ring lies in a gutter. Catrin stares out the train window without seeing the world go by. She allows herself to cry, bitter tears for what she’s lost. Not for the man, not really. But for the years. All that time spent chasing something that was never really there. Ellis is the same man he always was. She’s the one who’s changed. In another life, perhaps she wouldn’t have left him. Perhaps she wouldn’t have had anywhere else to go. She does now. She has work to do.  
The tears dry faster than she expects. There’s a section of the screenplay she wants to revise before the shoot, an uneven segue from one mood to another, an unexpected and rather baseless turn of events. One musn’t give an audience whiplash when they should be caught up in the moment. She’s already dreaming up dialogue to bridge sagging sections of the plot.  
Catrin Fraser sweeps dark hair behind her ears, scribbling lines in her notebook, absently smudging the cotton of her dress with ink. She’s transported back to the dusty office they share back in London, three desks stacked with a chaos of papers until she’d cleaned it out, uncovering surfaces not seen in months. More of a home than her empty flat. Pinning story elements on paper cards to their bulletin board, tossing ideas across the room, or straight into the rubbish bin. Bickering good-naturedly with Tom, crossing out his revisions and restoring her original passages.  
She’d readily admit she didn’t like Tom, when they’d first been introduced. She’d certainly told him to his face on several occasions. Stubborn, and more ready to respond with a sharp retort than properly listen. Cynical when she was optimistic. Cautious when she was adventurous. They’d clashed until they’d made room for each other, found a balance, drawn upon each of their strengths. He’s now the first one she wants to show her ideas to.  
The train whistle sounds.  
When Catrin returns, she looks for Tom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ngl I forget whether they mentioned her maiden name in the movie.


	3. Chapter 3

Tom’s glass is empty, and his head rests in his hands. He’s turned away from the festivities, which seems to have risen in tempo and volume over time just to get on his nerves. Elbows jostle him on both sides; he cannot will himself to take up any less space.  
Catrin’s voice cuts through the noise. A jolt, of joy, of terror. He spins, searches her face. A smile on her lips, sadness in her eyes, and uncertainty like she’s not sure she’s welcome back. He’s momentarily possessed by the urge to embrace her, but crosses his arms instead. A nod. A greeting. A silence.  
They go somewhere quieter to talk, the sea shore, a full moon the only light. He says all of the wrong things. Her response is scorching. No banter this time, no smiles behind heated words. She walks away and he watches her go, hoping she’ll turn back. She never does.  
Alone by the sea, his face burns. Tears threaten to spill over until he wipes them away and sets his expression into a grim mask. He can’t decide what he regrets more -- his stupid, ridiculous proposal, or the way he’d said it. For a screenwriter, he is certainly hopeless at expressing himself. He pictures every excruciating detail from her perspective. Of course she walked away.  
He will see her back home in London. They still have a job to finish. She’s a professional, she’ll manage. After it’s all done… well, he’ll have to let her go. As quickly as Catrin entered his life like a whirlwind, she’ll be gone. He has no words for the heartbreak that seizes him at the thought.

Alone in their London office, Catrin is hunched over her typewriter. Night has fallen. Planes overhead, the droning noise that used to fill her with dread, now fading into the background. Funny how much horror a person can get used to. When an explosion sounds in the distance and dust rains from the ceiling, she sweeps it away and continues to type.  
When it’s finished, she sits back, returning to reality. The last page, added to a stack of papers. A sigh of satisfaction. It isn’t a work of genius that’ll sweep the globe, but it’s a damn good story.  
Catrin’s eye is drawn to another pile of papers, left neglected by the couch. Tom had written an ending, dismissing it as rubbish the moment she asked about it. She’d read it through in a single sitting and had to agree. If things between them were as before, she’d tease him about the uninspired mess, but now it twists her stomach. She remembers the way he looked in the rare moments they were in the same room these days. Like he’d been hollowed out.  
She feels it too. Something broke that night in Devon, something she hadn’t properly noticed until it shattered. Left with only the aftermath, surprise, confusion, hurt. He hadn’t gotten down on one knee, far from it, but rather had asked her to marry him as if it had any place in the conversation they were having. She was so afraid that he was making fun of her. When she rejected him, she saw in his face that he wasn’t. That was the most infuriating part, that he’d meant it and he’d made it impossible to say yes. Not then, standing in the ruins of her old life, defending her choices, bickering with each other as they always did but this time with an intensity she hadn’t understood. As she walked away, she knew there was no returning to that moment.  
Catrin places a blank page into the typewriter, and begins to write.  
_A full moon. A clear sky. A man sits by the shore. There has been a quarrel._  
Fragile, all of it. A war raging outside, every day an uncertainty. How could a person create anything new in a place like this? How could anything good survive? Yet, here they were, toiling away at this film to inspire hope where there was so precious little left. Foolhardy, perhaps, but important all the same.  
_A woman is walking away from him. Now, she turns back._  
Catrin rewrites the moment. Words flow, what she wants to say to him but hadn’t been able to admit to herself.  
_I’d miss you._


	4. Chapter 4

That morning, Tom finds an empty office with a stack of papers arranged neatly on his desk. His own papers, his ending, are not tossed in the rubbish bin but are placed on the table beside. A polite suggestion. A smile twists up the corner of his mouth.  
Catrin’s ending is as brilliant as he would have expected of her, even if he wouldn’t admit it. Tom exhales, absently flipping to the last page, likely just a blank. The narrative has already been tied up beautifully with a bow, fade to black.  
The page isn’t blank, and it doesn’t belong with the others.  
_I’d miss you._  
Tom reads it twice, his heart hammering. He tries to see Catrin’s face as she wrote it, tries to intuit what she was thinking. He was meant to read this, but isn’t sure how he was meant to interpret it. He’s afraid to know the answer, in case it isn’t the one he wants. Maybe this is an olive branch, a return to the status quo, rescuing their friendship. They had been friends, before he’d gone and made a fool of himself.  
_I’d miss you more than I could say._  
Like a stuttering record, he replays the words over and over until they’re meaningless. He stirs, realizing he’s been sitting here utterly useless when he’s meant to be on his way. In a daze, he packs up the script and drifts from his office to the studio lot.  
Chaos, as usual. The director barks orders at anyone in his line of site, the crew rushes about, lights sputtering, rigging groaning. A massive pool is set before a backdrop, and miserable soaking wet actors sit in a prop boat, awaiting instruction. No one spares Tom a look as he walks in; they’re terribly behind schedule. A city block nearby has been knocked out by the night’s bombing, demolishing houses and blocking streets.  
Tom feels a chill. He starts asking questions as he looks around, searching for a face. Where, exactly, had been hit? Has anyone seen Catrin?  
Running late. Must be. Spent hours writing, overslept. She’s relentless when focused; he has to remind her to get some rest. But she’s never late.

Catrin’s home no longer stands. In the early hours of the morning, she stares at its smoking ruins, with the preposterous urge to laugh rising through the shock. She might have been among the rubble if she hadn’t been rewriting Tom’s godawful script for him that night, but here she remains. Still wondering whether he’s seen it yet and what he thinks. What the hell she’s going to do now is another slowly emerging consideration.  
The fireman yells after her, but she picks through the rubble, dauntless, hoping to gather what she can salvage. London has been rubble for years. This is no extraordinary danger. There isn’t much left, just singed clothing and warped metal.  
Then she unearths a small jewellery box, which has by some miracle preserved the photographs she kept within. Stills from the shoot in Devon, spotted with ash. Their self-declared star Ambrose, striking a pose at his best angle. Phyl, gazing at someone disapprovingly out of frame. Tom, by Catrin’s side, both of them laughing. Catrin gently wipes dirt from the faces in the photograph, drawn into the moment.  
A conversation with Phyl back home, echoing through her mind.  
_“It seems to me when life is so very precarious, it’s an awful shame to waste it.”_  
The world takes things away, and owes no warning. She stands in the midst of yet another reminder. She can’t regret what she wrote; by some dizzying close call, the typewriter kept her safe, gave her another day, another chance. But she can’t hide behind those pages any longer. She has to see him, and she has to tell him herself.  
That infuriating, beautiful man. They’ve wasted so much time already. Not a moment longer.  



	5. Chapter 5

She finds him in the eye of the hurricane, the only person on set who isn’t rushing here or there, as if he’s forgotten what he was doing the moment he locks eyes on her. A greeting evaporates on her lips as he sweeps her up in an embrace.  
Just as quickly, he steps back, rubbing the back of his neck and looking away. “Sorry.”  
“What was that for?”  
“You’re late.” As tactful as ever, curt words as a delayed defense.  
She laughs. “Was that meant to be congratulations?”  
“Bombings last night,” Tom mumbles. “Hoped you weren’t… inconvenienced.”  
“Oh, I’m fine, I was hard at work,” she says, eyeing him, curious whether he’d returned to the office this morning. “My flat on the other hand hasn’t been so lucky.”  
His eyes widen.  
“I’ll have it sorted,” she sighs. “A friend’s referred me to a boarding house by the pier. It will have to do for now.”  
He presses his lips together, as he does when he’s unhappy about something and searching for a solution. She’s seen it as he’s hunched over his typewriter, but now he’s looking at her like she’s the story that isn’t working out right. He reaches out, brushes away a streak of ash on her sleeve. She catches his hand before he’s restored the distance between them. He looks up, startled, unsure.  
“Did you read what I wrote?” she asks.  
“I did.”  
The silence draws too long.  
“Well?” she prompts.  
He clears his throat. “A fine ending. I needed a new perspective.”  
Her smile is admittedly smug. “Goodness, that was almost a compliment.”  
“Let’s not go and get a big head. Plenty of editing yet to do, and we’re already ages behind the--”  
“Tom.”  
His eyes flash up to meet hers. “Catrin?” he responds.  
“Did you read the rest?”  
“Yes. Yes, I did.”  
She exhales. No backing out now. “I meant what I said. Well, what I wrote. Much easier to write you mean than say it, don’t you think? Can revise if it’s coming out all wrong, tear up the page and start over, no harm done, and…” She trails off, searching his face. She’s rambling, and Tom’s expression in inscrutable. “Well? What did you think?”  
He takes a step closer, and her heart stutters. His hand’s still in hers and she squeezes it, looking for reassurance. He responds by pressing her hand to his lips, light as the brush of a butterfly’s wing.  
She’s certain her face has gone red. “Good, then?”  
“I missed you,” he says, stumbling over his words. “When you left. I realized… I needed you. It took me far too long to figure that one out. I was an idiot, and I sounded like one, and I’m sorry.” He lets out a shuddering breath. “I’d thought I’d made a thorough mess of all of it.”  
“Not irredeemably so,” Catrin responds, with a soft laugh. “Needs some polish, but I think we can work with this.”  
“Is that what you want to do?”  
“It is.”  
“Ah,” he says, seeming flustered, but a smile is tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Well then, that’s…”  
“ _Catrin._ ” A voice rings out, and the world that had faded away is suddenly restored to full noise and colour. Crew members swarm past, and the director approaches, impatiently waving to her. “We need a look at the script. Get over here. Hurry, now.”  
Tom and Catrin exchange somewhat dazed glances.  
“I’ll handle it,” Tom says, stepping back and letting go of her hand.  
“Are you sure?”  
“Won’t be a moment.” He starts off, sending a look over his shoulder at her. His smile is joyous.  
Catrin holds onto the image of that smile a moment longer, after he’s gone from her sight. Nothing seems more important than making that man smile like that again. As often as she can, for as long as she can. The future stretches out before her.  
Then it shatters.  
  
Yelling, frantic. Lights flicker and pop, plunging the sound stage into darkness. Groaning metal, snapping wood. A terrible crash, sending a shudder through the ground beneath her feet.  
Catrin is frozen in place, a nightmare she can’t wake from.  
Collapsed rigging. Sparking wires. Shards of glass. Someone lying amidst it all, so very still.  
She takes halting steps forward, but someone’s ushering her away. Her throat burns as if she’s screaming, but she can’t hear anything except the ringing in her ears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay but don't worry he survives this time.


	6. Chapter 6

A breeze flutters the curtains. Tom’s chest rises and falls. The only movement in a still life painting.   
Catrin sits by his bedside, fighting against the exhaustion that’s overtaking her. Almost two days of waiting, afraid to rest her eyes in case she opens them again and he’s no longer breathing. She’d brushed hair from his eyes. Angled his spectacles on the bedside just so. Paced the room. Now, adrenaline fades and she merely clings to his hand, which is frightfully cold, a weak pulse under her fingertips.   
A knock and Catrin startles nearly out of her chair. Ambrose, leaning against the doorframe for support. He took a hard hit, his leg done up in a cast, but has been hobbling around the hospital non-stop, bemoaning that he can’t return to set for another few days. He surveys her with kindness. Catrin, self-conscious, lets go of Tom, folding her hands in her lap.   
“Ought to get some rest,” Ambrose says. “I can take up watch if you like. He won’t run out on me, I can tell you that. I may not be as young as I used to be but I am still spry.”  
Catrin laughs, but it sounds like a sob.  
“Oh, come now,” Ambrose says, a bit softer. “It will be alright.”  
“How do you know?” she asks, half hoping he has an answer.   
“Well, for one, our dear Tom Buckley is the most stubborn person I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. Other than yourself, of course.”  
She laughs again, turning away slightly to wipe at the moisture in her eyes.   
“For another,” Ambrose continues, “I dare say you deserve a better ending than this.”  
Catrin shakes her head. “Plenty of people have deserved better than what they’ve got. Look where we are.”  
Ambrose blinks, glancing out into the hallway as if this is the first time he’s seeing his surroundings. “It looks like a hospital. That explains the nurses chasing me about with needles, I thought they were just dedicated fans.”  
“Very funny.”  
“I thought so.” He sighs. “Catrin, I know. There are no shortage of reasons to collapse under the weight of the world. But this isn’t over. I’d say there will always be room for hope. If there weren’t, we’d all be out of a job.”  
Catrin looks over at Tom. He breathes, quiet but steady.   
“Offer stands,” Ambrose prompts.  
“I’m alright, I’ll stay.”  
“Figured as much.” He straightens up and rearranges his crutches. “If you need me, I will be signing autographs.”  
“Ambrose?”  
“Yes, my dear?”  
“Thank you.”  
He nods, and then he’s gone from the doorway.  
The hush returns to the room. Catrin takes Tom’s hand.   
Within minutes, her eyelids drift closed.


	7. Chapter 7

Voices, echoing distantly as if he’s sunk to the ocean floor and they’re at the surface. He tries to draw nearer but his limbs ache with the toil, pain radiates across his skull as if it’ll split in two. Down in the dark, he strains to see, struggles to move.  
Indistinct shapes, light and shadow, warping, fading. He reaches for them, begs them to stay, pleads for help.  
Darkness, again.  
He sees Catrin. The last time he saw her, as he glanced back. Her eyes creased at the corners, her hand raised in a hesitant wave. He hadn’t wanted to leave her side for a moment. He’d meant to return to her. They’d only just found one another again. She’s still smiling back at him, but she’s further away now.  
He tries to cry out. He was supposed to stay with her.  
The world jolts back into focus.  
Soft light filters in through a window. Dawn.  
He stirs. Winces. Collapses back onto a paper thin mattress. Breathing takes effort, his ribs ache as his lungs expand. In fragments, he remembers the moment the world came crashing down on him. He feels every bit of it, the mercy of unconsciousness dissolving away.  
Light through the window. He tries to focus on sensory details, remaining in this new place although it takes all of his limited strength.  
Someone’s here with him.  
Catrin’s asleep by the bedside, slumped so far over in her chair that her head rests on the corner of his pillow. Her hand rests over his. A flood of relief is a powerful analgesic. If she’s here, then it’s alright.  
Eyes still closed, she mumbles something. Her hand squeezes his. He squeezes back. All of a sudden she’s awake, upright, searching his face with disbelief.  
“Tom?” she asks.  
He attempts a weak smile. “Hello.”  
Tears brim over, spilling down her cheeks.  
Confused, he frowns. He hadn’t meant to make her cry.  
Catrin lunges forward, grasping the sides of his face and pressing a kiss to his forehead. She pulls back only slightly, not letting go of him, murmuring a stream of rather jumbled but happy words.  
His expression crumples with worry as he takes in her appearance. There are dark circles around her eyes and no colour in her cheeks. Her dark hair, usually in gentle waves, sticks up at all angles.  
“Are you alright?” he whispers.  
“Am I alright?” she laughs, incredulously. Then the humour’s gone. “I thought-- Tom, I thought I’d lost you.”  
“Oh,” he says, his voice rasping. He clears his throat, but it does little good. “Well. You’re still stuck with me.”  
“We aren’t out of the woods yet,” she says softly. “I’m going to look after you.”  
“I feel great,” he says, then winces again as pain shoots through his ribs.  
She’s immediately on her feet. “I’ll get the nurse.”  
“Catrin,” he says.  
She seems to understand the anxiety that tinges his voice. “I’ll be back in no time.”


	8. Chapter 8

Catrin spends much of the next day sitting in the hallway as Tom’s cramped room is filled with a series of visitors. Not all are well-wishers. Business continues outside of the hospital’s walls, and the disaster on set has been yet another inconvenient setback for the folks in charge. Ambrose hasn’t fully recovered and they mean to write him out of the ending, despite his protests that he could do backflips if called upon. Tom is awake, if drowsy, and they take this as permission to badger him for a rewrite.  
She overhears the short conversation.  
“You have other writers, you know,” Tom says, impatiently. “Why aren’t you asking Catrin? She’s the best of us.”  
Catrin smiles.  
The revision is the one she’d wanted all along, taking the twins out of passivity and into the hero roles they were always meant to have. When she’s met with misgivings, she refuses to make a single additional change. Her rewrite is filmed the next day, exactly as she’s written it.  
She stays on set until the clapboard sounds. A collective sigh of relief seems to fill the soundstage. A wrap, at last. Hoots and hollers, pats on the back. The actors climb from the soggy set and make a beeline for the spirits. A few smiles are sent her way, from people who probably never bothered learning her name. Catrin cradles her copy of the script, taking in the moment.  
Familiar faces passing by. Parfitt, flipping hopelessly through several drafts of the script, pages fluttering out of his grasp. Lundbeck, The American, rehashing a war story to anyone who’ll listen. Phyl, speaking closely with a smiling actress, both of them blushing faintly. Ambrose, sulking in a corner.  
Catrin raises her eyebrows at Ambrose. He exhales and gives her a short nod of approval, with a regal air. She knows he’s already getting over his step back from the spotlight, after seeing her ending play out. The proper compliment will come when he’s ready.  
Lights snap off, one by one, as the set empties. Catrin takes a last look around before heading on her way.  
She catches Tom hastily picking up a novel as she approaches his room.  
“Keeping busy?” she asks, as if she hadn’t noticed.  
“Oh, you’re back already,” he says. “Time flew.” He’s a terrible actor. He’d wanted to be there too, but had insisted she go ahead and not worry about him. “How was it?”  
“No calamities this time, which was a refreshing change of pace,” Catrin says with a shrug.  
He smiles, detecting the enthusiasm under her nonchalant air.  
“It’ll be even better at the premiere,” she adds. “You’ll see then.”  
They lapse into silence for a moment, weighing her promise. Tom rarely speaks about it, but he’s been discouraged by his lack of progress. He spends most of the day in bed. When she’s around, he’ll put on a brave face and try for a few steps like the doctor recommends, but she can tell they’re agony. He knows he won’t ever be the same as he was, and every passing day lowers his expectations.  
“Time, that’s all,” Catrin says quietly. “We’ve got time.” One of her repeated phrases, which she’ll repeat until he believes it.  
When he offers no response, she sighs. The sun is setting, the light through the window a ember red sinking into a deep indigo. She hangs her coat over the chair at his bedside, indicating that she’s in no hurry to leave. The boarding house has nothing for her; when she isn’t at work, she’s here until Tom insists she go and get some sleep, muttering something about not needing attention every moment of the day.  
“What are you reading?” she asks.  
Tom stares dully down at the novel in his hands. “No idea. The nurse left it with me.”  
“Shove over.”  
“What?”  
She makes a shooing gesture. “Make some room.”  
His brow furrows but he shuffles over, allowing some space on the left side of the bed.  
At first, she sits at the edge. Then she flashes him a grin and kicks back on top of the covers, resting her head against his chest and peering at the words on the open page.  
“Really, Catrin.” There’s warmth in his voice, which rumbles against her ear. “What if someone sees?”  
“I’m sure they’ll forgive Mr. and Mrs. Buckley spending an evening reading together.”  
“ _Mrs. Buckley?_ ”  
“I may have let the staff call me by that name. I was spending so much time here, after all.”  
“Catrin, wh--”  
She tilts her head up at him, seeing little but the scruff on his jaw but sensing the red that creeps into his cheeks when he’s flustered.  
“Do you object?” she asks.  
“No, but, that’s… rather ahead of ourselves, don’t you think?”  
“You did propose, once upon a time.”  
“As I recall, you declined.”  
“And next time you ask, I’ll say yes.”  
Ignoring his sputtering, she turns back to the book, settling in.


	9. Chapter 9

The first snowflakes of winter dust London’s grey streets. Tom’s breath condenses and spirals away, even within the walls of his tiny flat. He wraps a blanket around his shoulders as he puts on the kettle, gazing out the window at an overcast sky. Steam whistles as the water boils, the clock ticks on the wall. Tom exhales, adding to the quiet symphony that breaks up the heavy silence.   
The months have passed at a crawl. He’s on his feet again more each day, taking slow laboured steps and gritting his teeth against the nerve pain that spikes through him relentlessly. Catrin took a lot of convincing to leave him on his own for more than a few hours at a time. At the beginning he could barely manage without her at his side, but now he’s increasingly standing on his own, and she has a life to return to.   
Their film will be released before Christmas and the studio is already organizing another project, some inspirational snapshot of a soldier on the front writing letters to his wife back home. Catrin’s spending her days holed up in the office with Parfitt, organizing concepts on the wall. At the end of the day, she returns to Tom with an invigorated smile on her face and runs every new idea by him, although they both know this screenplay’s hers. By midnight she’s returned to the boarding house to catch some sleep, and her absence is palpable. During the day, he tries not to stare at the clock until he sees her again.   
Neighbours clear out every few weeks, fleeing apartments turned to rubble or escaping before it’s their turn. The flat next door has a piano. An battered old grand, coated in dust that Tom sweeps away before taking a tentative seat before it.   
He recalls lessons in his youth from a family friend which faded out. His family was small town working class through and through, and expected him to pick up a practical trade. Instead, he attended university on a scholarship and became a writer. His degree didn’t impress anyone, nor did his scholarly spectacles and ill-fitting suits, but there was always a roast and a slice of pie waiting for him when he returned home. As Tom puts fingers to keys, he hears echoes of memories, affectionately hollering at him to cut out that racket. They soon disappear, and the music takes their place.  
He stutters through the beginning of a nocturne then relaxes into it, finding fluidity. There’s reassurance in the familiar melody, each note laid out ahead of him, fitting beautifully into the whole. So little else in his life has been certain.   
Silence as the song ends. A peace which can never be maintained for long. The wail of a siren, rising, overwhelming. He stumbles to his feet. Neighbours, pouring into the hall, rushing for the exits, none of them looking back.   
Tom’s throat tightens and he starts forward, trying to hurry, but his body isn’t cooperating. One step in front of the other, in agonizing slow motion. No time to grab his coat on the way out. He emerges into the cold air outside, the wind battering him.   
He presses his mouth into a grim line and heads for the shelter. His mind distracted from his own perilous journey by worries about Catrin. He knows if he doesn’t make it there, she’ll go out looking for him.   
Sirens and the droning of planes overhead, bearing down around him until he makes it to the underground. The noise outside echoes about the crumbling tube station, mixing in with the murmurs of the frightened gatherers. People are huddled in families and small groups, or standing alone, unsure where to look. Tom searches for Catrin. Perhaps she’s elsewhere in the city, has gone to a different shelter further from the office. The unknowns gnaw at him.  
The first of the rumblings begin, shaking the walls but distant still. Tom stands where he can watch the shelter’s entrance. He looks away for only a moment as tiles splinter across the tracks. When he looks back, she’s there. Catrin’s red-cheeked and out of breath, her coat buttons off kilter and dark hair askew.   
“Tom!”   
She hurls herself forward, wrapping her arms around him and nearly knocking him over with laughter and apologies.   
“You made it,” she breathes. “Thank God. I was going to detour to your apartment first but it was impossible to… People everywhere. Like swimming upstream.”  
“It’s alright,” he assures her, tucking a flyaway strand of her hair behind her ear.   
In response, she hugs him tighter.   
They find themselves a corner to wait out the long night ahead of them, discussing the latest project in hushed tones to distract from cold station and noise outside. Tom puts his arm around Catrin, and she rests her head on his shoulder.   
She nudges him, turning her head to look up at his face. “We’re starting to film next month, out in the country. It’s not quite close to the ocean as before, but I figure we can make a day trip to the coast once in a while.”  
“We?”  
“Of course you’ll come with me.”   
“Catrin,” he says with an incredulous laugh. “I’m not working on this project, I’m on leave.”  
“You’re a consultant.”  
“Meaning you tell me your ideas of a cup of tea in the evenings.”  
There’s a stubborn set to her jaw that makes him smile.   
“We’re going,” she says, then sighs. “We’re lucky. How many people get to escape reality for a little while?”  
“You’re right.”  
“Of course.” A pause. “What I mean is, I want you to come with me. I want you around.”  
“And I want to be around. So we’ll go.”  
“Wonderful,” she smiles.


End file.
